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Márkus Máté: The Basic Concepts of Existentialism – Kierkegaard

According to the foreword of a book summarising the writings of Rollo May, published in Hungarian last year, there has been a recent surge of interest in existential psychology.[1] It is therefore timely to clarify the concept of existentialism, which can be done by reviewing existentialism as a phenomenon of intellectual history, with an introduction to the representatives of existentialist philosophy. In the following article, I would like to review the oeuvre of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the first representative of existentialism, although the term did not exist at the time, with particular reference to the basic concepts that would later determine existentialism’s approach to the situation of human existence.

Kierkegaard’s ideas can be understood in the context of his life story and in response to idealism, especially absolute idealism. Kierkegaard was the youngest child of Kierkegaard Mikaël Pederson and Anne Sørensdatter Lund, born to a father aged fifty-six and a mother forty-four. He spent his early childhood with his father, who, as part of a deeply pietistic upbringing, taught his son Latin and Greek at an early age. Kierkegaard’s first noted thoughts date from his university years at the University of Copenhagen, where he was introduced to Hegel’s system, which became the subject of his criticism. After a few suspended semesters and years of “aesthetic life”, he completed his studies and became a pastor. After his break-up with his lover, seventeen-year-old Regina Olsen, and his subsequent break with his pastoral ministry, he retired and devoted his life exclusively to writing.[2] His most significant works are The Concept of Irony (1841), Either-Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Concept of Anxiety (1844), Repetition (1844), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Stages of Life’s Way (1846), Works of Love (1847), The Sickness onto Death (1849).

Kierkegaard had no significant influence on his own time. It was then, in the late 19th century, that his works were translated into German. He had a major influence on the intellectual history of the 20th century, both in philosophy, see Heidegger and Sartre, in theology, see Barth and Bultmann, and in psychology, see Freud. His particular influence is due to the unity of deep pietism and Hegelian categories (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) in him.[3] Kierkegaard, like Feuerbach and Marx, borrowed from Hegel the categories with which he criticized Hegel’s system. In what follows, we will review Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel and his works, introducing his central concepts.

The history of philosophy, rightly, most often discusses Kierkegaard’s ideas in the context of Hegel’s system.[4] Thus, in order to understand his ideas, it is necessary to have a concise account of Hegel’s system. Hegel’s basic idea is that the only reality is spirit.[5] The fact that spirit is the only reality does not mean that the world-entity is not real, but that it is spirit that realizes the rational structure of reality in a dynamic process. In this sense, the Hegelian direction of German idealism, absolute idealism, is the absolute opposite of naturalism. It is from this basic position – that spirit is that which realizes the rational structure of reality in a dynamic process – that Hegel’s view of history is composed. Spirit strives for freedom.[6] Spirit, however, strives for freedom not only at the level of the individual, but also at the level of humanity as a whole. The striving for freedom of the spirit of humanity is the history of humanity. The history of humanity is a dynamic and dialectical process, since in each historical age the spirit, in its striving for absolute freedom, frees itself from the relativity of the previous historical age and brings itself into a dialectical relationship with it. [7] The reduction to be avoided in this Hegelian view of history is the thesis-antithesis-synthesis division.

German idealism began with Kant, who sought to define the limits of human cognition in his Critique of Pure Reason.[8] The next representatives of idealism, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, with different orientations, wanted to structure the objective reality that can be known by pure reason. By the middle of the 19th century, however, such profound social changes had taken place in Europe that the focus shifted from “objective reality” to the “reality of the subject”. Schelling’s lecture on the relationship between subject and object at the University of Berlin in 1841, in front of an audience that included Engels, Bakunin, Burckhardt and Kierkegaard, is often cited as one of the highlights of this shift.[9] Thereafter, the subject of intellectual history discourse moved from object to subject, from being to being, from thought to passion.[10]

One of the first facts of this shift of attention, and with it the confrontation with Hegelianism, is Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). [11] Kierkegaard formulates that the problem with Hegelianism, and idealism in general, is that in seeking objective reality they ignore the reality of the subject. Reality is not an objective structure, but a subjective situation. Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel is that he unites essence and existence in the concept of absolute spirit. For Hegel, essence is that which is rational, existence is that which is real. Reality, through the dialectical self-realization of spirit, becomes more and more rational, while the unfolding of the absolute spirit unites the rational and the real, essence and existence. Hegel also introduces a new concept, which is then adopted by Kierkegaard, and through him by existentialism, as well as Feuerbach and Marx, but with a contrary argument, the concept of alienation.[12] For Hegel, matter is the spirit alienated or estranged from itself, but which will be reunited with that from which it is estranged. As Tillich notes, it is Kierkegaard, who grew up in a pietistic upbringing, in anxiety and guilt, who draws attention to the fact that man is not in a state of union but of estrangement. Essence and existence are not yet united. Union is possible in the world of essence, but not real in the world of existence. Kierkegaard, in criticising Hegel’s system, draws heavily on Friedrich Trendelenburg, who carried out a critique of Aristotle’s logic. His critique is that a logical process is a description of logical relations, but not a real process, i.e., not a temporal process. What Hegel did was to combine a dialectical logical process with a temporal process, namely the history of mankind.[13] The rational and the real, essence and existence can be united in the world of essence, but not in the world of existence. The situation of man is not described by objective structures, however dialectical they may be, because the situation of man is a subjective situation in which man is responsible for the actualization of his freedom; for his existence.

This is why Kierkegaard asked with all the passion he deserves, where is the freedom of the individual? As far as Hegel’s view of history is concerned, it can also be seen from the fact that, although the spirit strives for freedom, Hegel believes that the subject will actualise itself according to the spirit of each historical epoch, and that it has no subjective, genuine freedom.[14] It is difficult to understand why the negation of man’s own freedom becomes untenable for the 19th century if we do not take into account the current intellectual processes. The situation is probably best clarified by the famous words of Nietzsche, who writes in The Gay Sciences that God is dead (“Gott ist tot.”).[15] This phrase does not mean the death of God, but in symbolic language the death or disappearance of the divine, i.e., of absolute values. With the development of the natural sciences, belief in God as a supernatural being has become impossible, what is meant by the expression “death” of God, which is therefore not a theological statement but a psychological one. If belief in God is no longer possible, divine, so to say, absolute values are no longer possible either, and the lack of absolute values will cause the absolute crises of values. Exactly this is what happened in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

The greatest recent event—that “God is dead”; that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already starting to cast its first shadow over Europe. To those few whose eyes—or the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some kind of sun seems to have set; some old deep trust turned into doubt… Even less may one suppose many to know at all what this event really means—and, now that this faith has been undermined, how much must collapse because it was built on this faith, leaned on it, had grown into it—for example, our entire European morality…[16]

All this is Nietzsche, all of which Kierkegaard already experiences in the mid-19th century, that man is absolutely free, he can choose the life he wants to live.[17]

In Kierkegaard, in the context of freedom, and in response to Hegel’s dialectical system, a concept appears, the concept of “leap” (springet).[18] In a later work, The Concept of Anxiety, he shows, through the fall of Adam, that one can choose to actualise one’s freedom and not to.[19] It is not logically deducible how he should choose. And what cannot be logically deduced is a “leap”. Kierkegaard uses this term in two senses. As a choice of sin, and as a choice of faith. In Hegel’s system there is no “leap”, there everything unfolds in dialectical rationality, everything is necessary. But if sin is a necessity, it is no longer a sin. Schleiermacher, as Tillich points out, did this with the concept of sin, made it a necessity, thereby taking away man’s freedom, responsibility and the power of guilt.[20] Whether man actualizes his freedom, or how he actualizes it, is a leap. This is what man’s freedom means, that there is no fixed criterion by which he can choose this or that life.

Man must choose life for himself. Kierkegaard presents three ways of life that man can choose for himself, we can call them stages, but they are not necessarily successive stages, rather stages that are above each other, which exist in time simultaneously, not successively, so to say, man exists in them. The decisive factor is which one dominates in man’s existence. These stages are presented in Either-Or (1843) and Stages of Life’s Way (1846). Stages of Life’s Way follows the logic of Either-Or. Either-Or is about the fact that man either lives an aesthetic life or an ethical life. The aesthetic life is not just about the search for beauty but about detachment from reality, the ethical life is about the search for meaning. The aesthetic life is without meaning, the ethical life is sometimes without beauty or pleasure. Either-Or is about the compulsion to choose, about the fact that one must choose, but one is also free to choose the life one wants to live. [21] In Stages of Life’s Way, Kierkegaard writes of another stage of life, in addition to the aesthetic and ethical stages of life. The religious stage is the highest stage of existence. The ethical stage is above the aesthetic stage, because it gives more meaning than the aesthetic stage, but even the ethical stage does not give, absolute meaning, according to Kierkegaard, can only be given by faith.[22] Faith, in Kierkegaard’s terms, is a complete union with the will of God.

He develops the concept of faith described here in Fear and Trembling (1843), which presents the faith of Abraham through the story of Isaac’s sacrifice.[23] The subject of the work is the nature of faith. The work is about the paradoxical situation of Abraham’s obedience to God, even to the sacrifice of his son. That Abraham, in his obedience to God, is even capable of sacrificing his son means that the obedient commitment of faith is beyond ethical obligations; a kind of “leap” in which the believer must “leap away” from both reason and ethical obligations. The title of the work, Fear and Trembling, describes the existential state of being that the act of faith “leap” entails. Kierkegaard uses these terms to describe the inner turmoil and existential anguish that accompanies Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. Fear and trembling are thus expressions of the existential condition that accompanies this absurd “leap away”. The virtue of this absurdity is, metaphorically speaking, the virtue of the “knight of faith” (troens ridder).[24] Faith, in Kierkegaard’s terms, is therefore a passion; an unconditional passion for God, for union with him.

In his further work on faith, Philosophical Fragments (1844), Kierkegaard introduces a conceptual connection that will be significant for existential theology, but especially for neo-orthodoxy: the infinite qualitative difference between the finite and the infinite (den uendelige kvalitative forskel mellem det Endelige og det Uendelige).[25] Kierkegaard introduces the concept of the moment (øjeblikket).[26] The moment is the event in which the infinite breaks into the finite. The moment, that is, the breaking of the infinite into the finite, the ultimate form of this breaking through is the incarnation, the Christ moment, which can be grasped by faith alone.[27]

In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, the concept of faith is thus seen in relation to the concept of freedom. Man is free to choose faith, and man becomes free from aesthetic and ethical life by choosing faith. At the same time, another concept related to freedom appears in Kierkegaard, which will become the central concept of existentialism: the concept of anxiety. The Concept of Anxiety (1844) is the first work in the history of ideas to deal with this phenomenon systematically. According to Kierkegaard anxiety is fear without an object. Kierkegaard distinguishes between two forms of anxiety, which he illustrates through the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve. The first form he named objective anxiety, the one which Adam had experienced before the Fall. Man, which the word Adam means, is anxious both to actualize his freedom and not to. If he does not actualize his freedom, it will not become real; if he does, he may lose his reality. Anxiety is the correlate of freedom, as Kierkegaard puts it: “the dizziness of freedom” (frihedens svimmelhed).[28] All this means that anxiety is triggered by the subject’s awareness of the infinite possibilities of his self-actualization, in other words, of the fact that he can actualize himself in any direction, but in the process of actualizing himself, he can also lose himself. The second form of anxiety (subjective anxiety) that Adam experiences after the Fall is the anxiety of guilt. In a state of guilt or anxiety over guilt, the subject becomes aware that in the process of actualizing it, he has lost himself, his essence, i.e., he has not become his true self (“at blive sig selv”).

The anxiety of guilt, is the subject of Kierkegaard’s other book, The Sickness unto Death (1849).[29] The “sickness upon death” is a metaphor for the despair that is in every human being. Kierkegaard uses a number of Hegelian categories to express the conflict in man, the conflict between essence and existence: man does not exist according to his essence. [30] This is the conflict of sin, and the awareness of this conflict is guilt. The subject, to set himself free from guilt, is ready to set himself even from himself by the act of suicide – if he were not aware of the conflictual character of this act. Only faith can be the “cure” for this “sickness”.

A review of Kierkegaard’s works reveals that Kierkegaard opposes idealism, which sought to unite essence and existence in the spirit. He describes the human condition through the concepts of freedom, anxiety, despair, sin and faith. Man can actualize his freedom, but freedom involves anxiety, both before actualization and when he loses his essence during actualization. The conflict between essence and existence is sin, and the awareness of this conflict is guilt, with its ultimate form, which is despair. The conflict of essence and existence can be united in the state of faith by the paradox of the Christ-moment, which can be grasped by the paradox of faith.

Main directions of influence – Reflection from Psychological and Theological point of views

The existentialist term dates from the 1940s. It was first used by Sartre, applied to himself, in his lecture L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a humanism).[31] What is meant by existentialism was not given a very concrete definition even then, given the diversity of philosophers associated with the concept. In a broader sense, existentialism can be defined as a spirit that seeks to grasp man in his own state of being. Its first prominent exponent was Søren Kierkegaard. All those who have later been given the label existentialist are heavily influenced by his work. Both Heidegger and Sartre build their notions of anxiety directly on Kierkegaard, Heidegger as fear without an object, Sartre as the dizziness of freedom.

However, the real significance of Kierkegaard, in which he preceded his own time, is that he grasped man in his irreconcilably conflictual situation, contrary to absolute idealism, which grasped man in the process of reconciliation of essence and existence.

If we want to narrow down the concept of existentialism, we can do so, following the first representative of existentialism, by asserting that existentialism is not an orientation that seeks to grasp man in his being, but an orientation that seeks to grasp man in the conflict of essence and existence.

The existentialist orientation that seeks to grasp man in his conflict, has had a pioneering impact in two areas in the 20th century. The first field, chronologically, is psychology. Freud, who was familiar with the works of Kierkegaard, made the claim that man is in conflict with himself, and this claim became the basis of the whole analytic movement. In chronological order, but only a few years later, the second field is theology. Theology in the 19th century, under the influence of Hegelianism, fostered the hope that essence and existence were to be united as the worldly realisation of the “kingdom of God”. All these theological trends are incomprehensible without an understanding of Hegel’s system. In any case, the historical events of the early 20th century have made this hope impossible. Barth, who was also familiar with Kierkegaard’s works, recognised that there was an “infinite qualitative difference” between the infinite and the finite, between God and man. God is everything and man is nothing. Man is totally lost therefore he needs God, who is totally different (totaliter aliter), and therefore he needs God to speak (Deus dixit) to him, penetrating from outside into the sphere of human existence. All this became the basis of a “theology of the revelation”, which was the most significant theological development of the 20th century.

Kierkegaard, indirectly, therefore, had an extraordinary impact in the 20th century, not only in philosophy but also in theology and psychology. In what he definitively defined the main thrust of existentialism is the conflict between essence and existence in man.

Bibliography

Bartha Tibor: Az Isten Igéje és igehirdetésünk, Kísérlet a barthi teológia homiletikai problémáinak megértésére, Különlenyomat a Theologiai Szemle 1938. évi. XIV. évf. pótfüzetéből, Debrecen, 1938.

Janaway, Christopher: “God is Dead” in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes – John Richardson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, trans.: Marcus Weigelt, Penguin Classics, London, 2003.

Kierkegaard, Søren: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson – W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1941.

Kierkegaard, Søren: Either/Or, Vol. I, trans. D. F. Swenson – L. M. Swenson, Princeton, NJ, 1941. – Vol. II, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, 1944.

Kierkegaard, Søren: Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1941.

Kierkegaard, Søren: Fear and Trembling – The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, NJ, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954.

Kierkegaard, Søren: Philosophical Fragments, trans. D. F. Swenson, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1936.

Kierkegaard, Søren: Stages on Life’s Way, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1940.

Kierkegaard, Søren: The Concept of Dread, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1944.

Kierkegaard, Søren: The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1941.

Lowrie, Walter: A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1942.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common, Mineola, NJ, Dover Publications, 2006.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff – Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

MacIntyre, Alasdair: “Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, Vol. 5., e.: Donald M. Borchert, Thomson Gale, London, 2006.

May, Rollo: A létezés felfedezése, Egzisztenciális pszichológiai írások, Budapest, Park Kiadó, 2024.

Meyer, Hans-Jürgen: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46, No. 3, 1985, 327–345.

Pattison, George: “Kierkegaard” in The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, ed. John Protevi, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2005.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007.

Tillich, Paul: A History of the Christian Thought, From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten, New York, NY, Simon & Schuster, 1967.

Tillich, Paul: Existential Philosophy, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1Jan., 1944), 45.

Hegel, G. W. Friedrich: Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1993.

Reference

  1. Rollo May: A létezés felfedezése, Egzisztenciális pszichológiai írások, Budapest, Park Kiadó, 2024, 9. ↑
  2. Alasdair MacIntyre: „Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Second Edition, vol. V., e.: Donald M. Borchert, Thomson Gale, London, 2006, 61. See also: Walter Lowrie: A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1942. ↑
  3. Paul Tillich: A History of the Christian Thought, From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten, New York, NY, Simon & Schuster, 1967, 459. ↑
  4. George Pattison: “Kierkegaard”, in The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, ed. John Protevi, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2005, 339. ↑
  5. The translation of this word, in both English and Hungarian, raises several problems. In the history of human thought, man has been dichotomously divided into body and mind, the latter having taken on the meaning of cognitive qualities in English. The qualities known in ancient Greek were physis, psyche (Latin: “anima”), and pneuma (Latin: “spiritus”), the last of which became a divine quality, with the result that the English term “spirit” became exclusively religious. At the same time, Hegel’s basic idea that the only reality is “Geist”, cannot be understood from the translation “mind”, since by the only real “mind” we will understand an absolute, but disembodied mind – as Tillich points out. But the “Geist” described by Hegel is absolute precisely because the whole reality is the actualization of the “Geist”, which is why he calls it the only reality. In order to avoid the meaning of mind in English, Tillich distinguishes between the absolute “spirit” and the relative “spirit” with a capital “S” – a procedure by which the Hungarian Bible Society distinguishes between the Spirit of God and the human spirit, as the term “szellem” is not established in the Hungarian language in a Christian context. According to the philosophical practice in Hungarian, we translate Geist as spirit and Geistesgeschichte as “history of spirit”, with the remark that the absolute spirit does not happen to mean an absolute mind, but the absolute spirit, Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma, Latin spiritus, which actualizes the world.
    Tillich: A History of the Christian Thought, 416; Pattison: „Kierkegaard”, 339. ↑
  6. G. W. Friedrich Hegel: Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1993, 137–138. ↑
  7. MacIntyre: „Kierkegaard”, 62. ↑
  8. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, trans.: Marcus Weigelt, Penguin Classics, London, 2003. ↑
  9. The title of the lecture: Die Philosophie der Mythologie und der Offenbarung volt. Paul Tillich: Existential Philosophy, in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. V., 1944/1, 45.
    Rollo May: A létezés felfedezése, Egzisztenciális pszichológiai írások, 79. ↑
  10. Pattison: „Kierkegaard”, 339. ↑
  11. Søren Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. D. F. Swenson – W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1941. ↑
  12. Tillich: A History of the Christian Thought, 461. ↑
  13. Tillich: A History of the Christian Thought, 461. ↑
  14. “In terms of the Hegelian view, an individual is essentially a representative of his age.” in MacIntyre, „Kierkegaard”, 62. ↑
  15. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Common, Mineola, NJ, Dover Publications, 2006, 90–91. This publication contains the text of the first English translation: Friedrich Nietzsche: The Joyful Wisdom, vol. 10, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Thomas Common, London, T. N. Foulis, 1910. ↑
  16. “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead’; that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already starting to cast its first shadow over Europe. To those few whose eyes—or the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some kind of sun seems to have set; some old deep trust turned into doubt… Even less may one suppose many to know at all what this event really means—and, now that this faith has been undermined, how much must collapse because it was built on this faith, leaned on it, had grown into it—for example, our entire European morality…” in Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff – Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. ↑
  17. Christopher Janaway: “God is Dead”, in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, ed. Ken Gemes – John Richardson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, 256–257. ↑
  18. First occurrence in the Philosophical Fragments. Søren Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments, trans. D. F. Swenson, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1936, 53. ↑
  19. Søren Kierkegaard: The Concept of Dread, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1944, 28–29. ↑
  20. Tillich: A History of the Christian Thought, 464. ↑
  21. Søren Kierkegaard: Either/Or, Vol. I, trans. D. F. Swenson – L. M. Swenson, Princeton, NJ, 1941. – vol. II, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, 1944. ↑
  22. Søren Kierkegaard: Stages on Life’s Way, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1940, 398–401. ↑
  23. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1941. ↑
  24. Søren Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling – The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, NJ, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, 59. ↑
  25. Søren Kierkegaard: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 82–83. ↑
  26. Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments, 13. ↑
  27. Later, Karl Barth’s theology draws heavily on Kierkegaard’s notion of faith, of the moment, and of the qualitative difference between the finite and the infinite. As Barth himself put it: “If I have a theological system at all, it consists in keeping what Kierkegaard called the infinite qualitative difference between time and the timeless … as steadfastly in view as possible.” / “Ha van egyáltalán teológiai rendszerem, úgy az abban áll, hogy én azt, amit Kierkegaard az idő és az időtlen közötti végtelen kvalitatív különbségnek nevezett … a lehető legállhatatosabban szem előtt tartom.” in Bartha Tibor: Az Isten Igéje és igehirdetésünk, Kísérlet a barthi teológia homiletikai problémáinak megértésére, Különlenyomat a Theologiai Szemle 1938. évi. XIV. évf. pótfüzetéből, Debrecen, 1938, 6. ↑
  28. Kierkegaard: The Concept of Dread, 55. ↑
  29. Søren Kierkegaard: The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1941. ↑
  30. Tillich: A History of the Christian Thought, 464. ↑
  31. Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007. ↑